Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.0

That’s right, version 1.0 is out! After more than a year of refinements, we now have a rock solid release.

When we first launched this site back in the summer of 2010, we had a few concept sketches and some very ambitions goals: to create an elegant HTML5-based user interface library for the jQuery community designed to work on all popular mobile platforms. We are built on the strengths of jQuery core and jQuery UI and strive to make mobile development efficient, accessible and maybe even a bit fun.

To reach the broadest possible audience, we decided from the start to make the framework work on every popular mobile, tablet, e-reader and even desktop platforms by embracing HTML5 and responsive design techniques. A tall order, but we’re happy to announce that we’ve achieved this goal and now support all our target platforms as of 1.0. By using a progressive enhancement approach, even less capable devices can still access the content and functionality of a jQuery Mobile site. This broad compatibility gives you the ability to reach many billions of people.

Equally as important, we set out to make this framework easy for developers to get up and running fast, with a minimal learning curve. Less technical folks can configure the framework with just HTML markup, but we maintain the full power of jQuery and a robust event and plugin system under the hood for developers who want to deeply extend the framework. By using tools like PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile code can be transformed into apps to be distributed through all popular app stores. A rich ecosystem of developer tools and frameworks make jQuery Mobile even more powerful, offering everything from MVC frameworks to Dreamweaver integration.

Throughout the course of the year, the team has spent thousands of hours refining the framework and we are thrilled that have finally reached this important milestone. We’ve been blown away by the community support and look forward to seeing what what you build with jQuery Mobile. We’re already hard at work on the next version wich will bring improved page transitions, new widgets and more and look forward to a very productive year ahead.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Performance

In case you missed the RC3 release earlier this week, we’ve spent a lot of time recently profiling pages to find where we can reduce function calls to speed up page rendering time. The results have been impressive: we’ve managed to speed up the page enhancement time up by 30-50% across all platforms at a minimum compared to RC2. As pages become even more complex, the speedup can increase to roughly 150% which means that enhancement takes far less than half the time it did in RC2. We’re already working on improving touch event responsiveness, page transition and scrolling smoothness and other important factors in upcoming releases so stay tuned.

ThemeRoller for Mobile

We’re excited to announce the release of the new ThemeRoller for Mobile tool. ThemeRoller is a web-based tool that makes it super simple to create custom themes without writing a single line of CSS. Drag and drop colors to create your masterpiece, then share it via URL or download a ZIP file with your custom theme stylesheet, ready for production (or additional tweaking). We’d like to thank Adobe who dedicated the development time of Tyler Benziger to work exclusively on ThemeRoller for more than 6 months. Read more about ThemeRoller in the release announcement.

If you’re looking for inspiration, check out jqmgallery.com so see lots of really great examples of sites and apps built with jQuery Mobile. Know of a great example? Submit a site or app to jqmgallery.com.

Upgrade notes

Since lots of people have been jumping in and using jQuery Mobile through the alpha, beta and release candidates, we’ve collected links to all the release announcements for quick reference. These are worth a read if you’re planning on upgrading an exisitng project to 1.0, or are just curious about the chronology of the project leading up to this release.

Financial support is another critical way corporations support the project. We’d like to thank Research In Motion, HP/Palm, Nokia, Microsoft, Rhomobile for contributing generously to the project to support our mission. We’d also like to thank the various companies and individuals who have donated test devices to the project.

If you are interested in giving back to the project, please contact Todd Parker.

Platform support in 1.0

jQuery Mobile has broad support for the vast majority of all modern desktop, smartphone, tablet, and e-reader platforms. In addition, feature phones and older browsers are supported because of our progressive enhancement approach. We’re very proud of our commitment to universal accessibility through our broad support for all popular platforms.

We use a 3-level graded platform support system: A (full), B (full minus Ajax), C (basic). The visual fidelity of the experience is highly dependent on the CSS rendering capabilities of the device and platform so not all A grade experience will be pixel-perfect but that’s the nature of the web.

123 thoughts on “Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.0”

Comment navigation

Great, but how can we update Dreamweaver to use it?
I figured out a way around the lack of an Adobe update here, http://goo.gl/gCNWJ, but Im missing the part on how to upgrade the core too 1.6.4. Anyone? Yes im newbee